Watching dogs and cats sleep, and thinking about life, as I am wont, the topic of the ideal life came to me again.
[For another thread: which philosopher said this is the goal of philosophy? One? Many?]
Anyway, I picked up on an idea I OP’d here recently, on which species has it easiest, and remembered the proposal by Colibri, which was seconded by another poster, that the tapeworm won the sweepstakes.
But then, looking at the cats, I–and am sure most everybody–realized that for us, at least, sleeping all day is practically a sine qua non of that realm.
And so to hed. (I sound like Boswell. Or is it Pepys?)
The “if not, why not” part is to ask: at what level of functioning, in an evolutionary sense, do organisms get sleep built in?
As one point of comparison, nematodes have sleep-like behaviors that are governed by many of the same mechanisms that control sleep in humans. That would place the likely origin of sleep before the divergence of protostomes and deuterostomes, right near the origin of animal life and way before the origin of tapeworms. Off the top of my head I’ve heard it hypothesized that some sort of sleep is a characteristic of just about anything with a nervous system.
Eyes are not limited to mammals and birds, and the eye movements aren’t the important part of the REM-phase. It’s not like the secret of sleep is that it’s actually eye exercise.
Socrates is probably the best known and earliest thinker in Western philosophy to have explicitly identified the aim of philosophy with determining what constitutes “the good life”.
Now back to your regularly scheduled tapeworm musings.
(I suppose you risk mod action if it wooshes someone though.)
